Yahoo!'s European services suffer after attack on US portal

Yahoo!'s European network was intermittently down last night following an attack on the service provider's US operation.

Attackers reportedly hit the US portal at 10.30am PST time, jamming Yahoo!'s internal network and stopping millions of users accessing mail, schedules and the directory service for three hours.

A Yahoo! spokesman confirmed that the company had suffered a "co-ordinated distributed denial-of-service attack" resulting from an overload of traffic sent by an external source that had intermittently shut down European services during 8.30pm and 11.30pm UK time.

"Obviously someone externally sent through this surge of traffic, but I cannot comment on whether it was malicious or not," he said.

However, Yahoo! denies that the attack was the work of hackers and said the security of its system is not in question.

"There was absolutely no problem with security, it was simply a surge of traffic sent at such a pitch that the systems can't cope," said the spokesman, who confirmed that Yahoo! is upgrading its systems to ensure that such a crash does not happen again.

In the US, yahoo.com, broadcast.com and my.yahoo.com sites were blacked out. Some of the portal's other interests such as Geocities were unaffected.